Salience Labs

Photonics · AI Infrastructure · Semiconductors

Funding

Salience Labs raises $125M Series B for optical AI chip switches

Copper wiring is nearing its physical limits as AI clusters scale to tens of thousands of GPUs, pushing data centers toward light-based switching.

• Salience Labs closed an oversubscribed $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank also joining.
• The Oxford spin-out, founded in 2021 by CEO Vaysh Kewada and CTO Johannes Feldmann, builds optical circuit switching chips that connect thousands of GPUs across racks using light instead of electrical signals.
• Salience demoed a 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, which it calls an industry first for silicon-photonics-based optical circuit switching, and is now developing 128- and 256-port versions.
• Proceeds will fund volume manufacturing with partners including Tower Semiconductor and Keysight Technologies, plus a second U.S. office in Silicon Valley to sit alongside its Oxford base.
• The company previously raised $30 million in February 2026 led by Applied Materials' venture arm, bringing its total disclosed funding to roughly $155 million.
• Analyst firm Cignal AI projects the optical circuit switching market will pass $8 billion by 2030 as AI data centers run into networking and power bottlenecks.
• Conventional switches convert light to electrical signals and back to route data, adding latency and power draw; skipping that conversion could ease the energy constraints now limiting AI data center buildouts.